New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow's The Bezzle is a high stakes thriller where the lives of the hundreds of thousands of inmates in California’s prisons are traded like stock shares.
The year is 2006. Martin Hench is at the top of his game as a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerrilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He spends his downtime on Catalina Island, where scenic, imported bison wander the bluffs and frozen, reheated fast food burgers cost 25$. Wait, what? When Marty disrupts a seemingly innocuous scheme during a vacation on Catalina Island, he has no idea he’s kicked off a chain of events that will overtake the next decade of his life.
Martin has made his most dangerous mistake yet: trespassed into the playgrounds of the ultra-wealthy and spoiled their fun. To them, money is a tool, a game, and a way to keep score, and they’ve found their newest mark—California’s Department of Corrections. Secure in the knowledge that they’re living behind far too many firewalls of shell companies and investors ever to be identified, they are interested not in the lives they ruin, but only in how much money they can extract from the government and the hundreds of thousands of prisoners they have at their mercy.
A seething rebuke of the privatized prison system that delves deeply into the arcane and baroque financial chicanery involved in the 2008 financial crash, The Bezzle is a sizzling follow-up to Red Team Blues.

Cory Doctorow is a multi-award-winning science fiction author, technologist, activist and speaker. His novels include Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe and the recently released contemporary fantasy, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.

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"Righteously satisfying...A fascinating tale of financial skullduggery, long cons, and the delivery of ice-cold revenge." - Booklist on The Bezzle
"Robert Heinlein was always known—and always came across in his writings—as The Man Who Knew How the World Worked. Doctorow delivers the same sense of putting yourself in the hands of a fellow who has peered behind Oz’s curtain. When he fills you in lucidly about some arcane bit of economics or computer tech or social media scam, you feel, first, that you understand it completely and, second, that you can trust Doctorow’s analysis and insights. That makes for a great reading experience." - Locus on The Bezzle
"It’s a novel of issues, presented as they should be, detail by devastating detail. The issues and ideas are this novel’s warp, the specificity and sometimes surprising emotional truths its weft." -- Maria Farrell on The Bezzle
"Cory Doctorow is one of our most important science fiction authors."
--Kim Stanley Robinson
"Cory Doctorow doesn't just write about the future--I think he lives there!"
--Kelly Link
"Another winner from an sf wizard." --Booklist on Red Team Blues
"Absorbing and ruthless." --Library Journal on Red Team Blues
"A cleareyed warning...With unconventional gumshoe Martin at the helm, fans can expect good things from the series to come."
--Publishers Weekly on Red Team Blues